Now, I play video games, but I don’t really think of myself as a Gamer. I don’t have an enormous backlog of titles I’ll never play — have you ever seen a Steam library without a scroll bar? — and I tend to pick up games very sparingly.

A $80 game is a huge investment, one I’ll only make if it feels justified. And even smaller games tend to be few and far between.

As a result, this list of six games is pretty exhaustive. These are, best I can remember, the only games I played this year, for more than a few minutes. Some of them aren’t even from this year! But they are games I played, and I enjoyed all of them for various reasons.

This list is chronological, not ranked, because I’m a software developer and am inherently suspicious of stack rankings.

Super Lesbian Animal RPG

My wife got me into the pony fandom before we even started dating. I have been to multiple Bronycons, and I had multiple cosplays for each one. No, you can’t see them, most of them were really badly put together. But though G4 may have waned, I still keep up with a lot of people I met or found through that space.

So of course I eventually needed to play Bobbi Schroeder’s remastered masterpiece.

This game started life as Bobbi Schroeder Presents: Super Lesbian Horse RPG Pre-emptive Game of the Year Edition. I never played that game, but my wife has, so originally we intended to play it together. But for reasons I’ll discuss later, we don’t tend to play a lot of games together, so eventually I just picked it up myself.

Now, given that I’m not much of an anything gamer, I can’t really be a JRPG gamer, so there was a bit of a learning curve. But this game was as gentle an introduction to that world as one could ask for.

Also, the characters are extremely cute and well designed, the soundtrack bucks all kind of apples, and it’s absolutely beautiful to boot. I highly recommend you give it a play if you haven’t!

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Y’all know what it is.

I played Breath of the Wild quite a bit, only a year or two ago. I was looking around my wife’s switch and well, I’d heard it was good! I actually only got around to properly beating it a few days before Tears came out. And in similar fashion, despite making it to the endgame, wife and I have not finished Tears of the Kingdom.

I initially wasn't too sure about this game! The initial game had a lot of... gravitas, to me, and I thought the weird contraptions took away from that. I wanted a good game, not a silly game. But it all grew on me. The mechanics end up feeling so well meshed it's surprising a game ever didn't have them.

I did have a lot of fun with it, though! I enjoyed Addison’s silly little puzzles, I liked glueing rockets to things, I thought Josha was the cutest thing in the world. The combat was at a good level for me — I could parry a Guardian blast in BotW about 75% of the time, for calibration’s sake.

And above all, no game has ever made exploration feel so incredibly good. Many games have tried: I played a lot of Genshin Impact when it came out, and that was definitely playing in the same ballpark. But the worlds were smaller, less dense. It feels like there’s something neat over just about every corner.

That illusion fades after a while - there’s only so many bokoblins you can knock out, no matter how satisfying your laser drone makes it. And one of the game’s biggest areas gets awfully repetitive after you clear out the few major items. But we got dozens of happy hours out of it.

I do wish I’d had more time to engage with the home-building mechanic, but we were never just post-economic enough to justify it. But later on I managed to scratch that itch with:

Palia

Palia, the “What if Rune Factory was an MMO” title, commanded a lot of my attention for a few weeks. The game has almost no combat at all, which was a relief - it was far from my favourite part of Tears. You can hunt Fantasy Deer with a bow, but mostly you’re collecting resources, capturing bugs, planting crops, and talking to townies.

And, of course, laying out and decorating your house.

The MMO aspect doesn't always... make sense. There’s romanceable townies, but no narrative contrivance for why everyone playing can date the same dozen people (Listen I’m poly, but there are Limits). You see other people in the world running up to give gifts to your girlfriend, but all the dialogue is written like you’re the only person in the world.

There’s been a fair amount of ink spilled about the rare resources in the world, too. The cultural expectation is that when you find one, you mention it in area chat, then wait for other people to join you. Everyone who takes part in the experience gets the same amount of loot, but the spawns are relatively rare. It can be kind of tedious to wait. It can also be very embarrassing when you say you’re coming but can’t find the resource nodes!

I didn’t stop playing the game for any particular reason, I just kind of fell off it. But it’s still very early days for the game, and I’m hoping to check on it over 2024 as it gets new features and areas. It just came out on Switch, so maybe that’ll reinvigorate interest a bit.

Pokemon Go

Yeah, people still play this game! My wife* got back into it, and at her urging wife and I picked it up again too. We have a dog who needs walked twice a day, so it was pretty easy to get a little bit of play in every day. And there was a big Masterball quest that really had me focusing on little challenges I wouldn’t normally do. I am much better at Excellent throws, I’ve done more gym battles than ever, and I even sort my Pokemon by star rating sometimes. It was almost certainly the game I put the most hours in this year.

I eventually fell off it for the reason I have in the past: There’s just not that much there once you get bored of throwing pokeballs and tapping your screen a lot. Once I fell off my catch streak during a conference, I just never picked it back up. In a year or two I’ll probably get back into it for a few months and fall off it.

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (2023 Remaster)

I like hanging out with my wife, my wife likes some video games, I like some of them. But unfortunately it’s pretty rare that there’s something we both like that we can actually play together. She doesn’t particularly like multiplayer games in general, so your standard co-op game was right out.

But it turns out Ghost Trick threads that needle perfectly! The puzzles are just difficult enough that two sets of eyes are better. She can drive, but we can work together to figure out what actually needs to be done.

And of course it helps how utterly charming the game is. The art style is beautiful, the characters are varied and interesting, and the writing is just hilarious. It’s a game that takes itself just seriously enough.

It’s not a terribly long game - we probably finished it in a week or two of semi-regular sessions. But it was an absolute joy from start to finish, all the more because it was something we could do together. If you’ve got a wife, I highly recommend checking it out.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

One of my superpowers when playing a game is that I don’t think I’m particularly good at it. That means, instead of getting frustrated at a lousy mechanic or my own inability, I tend to assume I’m not good enough and just keep trying.

And for AC6, I very much needed to Keep Trying. Most of the boss fights probably took me 50+ tries, learning the mechanics, patterns, and developing new muscle memory. I have, for the record, never played anything From Software has made, nor any of the adjacent genres. So the learning curve was steep.

And this is not a game that eases you into it: The very first boss you encounter, before you’ve even seen the customization menu, is already a skill gate. But I appreciate that! Right at the beginning, AC6 is letting you find out if this game is for you. If you can dodge enough missiles and machine gun fire, You can hit a helicopter with a sword and play the rest of the game. If not? Well, my wife and a friend bounced off the game around or slightly after this boss.

At press time I’ve finished the first playthrough of the campaign, rolled the credits and had a Lot of Feelings (I originally picked the game up because Renata Price said it made her cry.) I was challenged, and I felt great accomplishment in overcoming those challenges. And I’m looking forward to tearing my heart out with the rest of my playthrough, since of course the game has multiple endings.

The one downside is that I’m forced to conclude there’s some video games I’m pretty good at. I may not have played a perfect game, but my build isn’t particularly cheesy or overpowered either. And it’s absolutely mine, I have looked up almost nothing to do with this game, nor asked almost anyone else for help. So when Raven hits the top rank of the Imaginary Mech Dojo, that’s all me, baby.

What’s Next!

I don’t know what I’m going to play next year! It certainly doesn’t have to be a new game. I’ve been thinking I might try Nier: Automata after I finish AC6, or maybe just go back to Palia for a bit. Wife and I started playing Hypnospace Outlaw (a little awkward on a console, but we make it work). And I do still very much want to finish SLARPG.

But if you’ve got any recommendations, let me know! I am very suggestible always open to recommendations. And have a happy Gregorian new year!